Sundance 2023 Documentaries - Food and Country and 20 Days in Mariupol

Welcome to day 5 of our Sundance/Slamdance Film Festival coverage! Along with our Park City co-host, John Wildman of Films Gone Wild, we're highlighting two Sundance documentaries that deal with current issues around the world and here in the US- Food and Country, and 20 Days in Mariupol.

Food and Country follows trailblazing food writer Ruth Reichl during her journey to connect with small farmers, ranchers, and chefs, as they try to survive not only during the pandemic, but through the systemic challenges they face in the food industry. We were happily reunited with return guest, director Laura Gabbert (our first interview was for her 2015 film City of Gold), and she explains how she met Ruth Reichl, and how a film about restaurants surviving during the pandemic became  an expansive history of the food industry, and the struggle behind the food we eat.

20 Days in Mariupol (winner of the Sundance World Cinema Documentary Competition Audience Award) is a film that everyone in the world needs to see. As the Russian invasion of Ukraine was all but imminent, a team of Ukrainian journalists enter the port city of Mariupol and the film captures those first 20 days of bombing, assault, and attempts at fleeing from the locals. Ukrainian AP journalist and director Mstyslav Chernov shares how he copes with the dangerous nature of his work, and his hope that this film will not only help people understand what it means to be at war, but also push people to demand that Ukraine gets the help that they deserve.